The Actions You Take Make You a Leader

One of my recent favourite reads has been Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change by William B. Joiner and Stephen A. Josephs. I found it “accidentally” while looking for management books on how to effectively delegate. It’s not about that at all but a comment from a Goodreads reviewer that suggested it was like watching The Matrix for the first time caught my eye.

It is a bit like watching The Matrix for the first time in that it’s consistently surprising. The authors, based on a few decades of their own in-depth research and experience, outline a framework for different stages of adult development and how understanding those stages will help one grow in leadership effectiveness. It’s a fascinating concept well explained and argued for by them.

I’ll let you read the book to learn more (though I intend to write more about it at some point) but I’ll leave you with this quote from the introduction on just what Leadership is in their definition. The second paragraph is a footnote to the first that I’ve folded in for clarity.

Throughout the book we use the term leadership to refer to a way of taking action, not to an organizational role or position. Because we distinguish between five different levels of leadership agility, our definition is a broad one, designed to apply to all five levels: Leadership is action taken with a proactive attitude and an intention to change something for the better.

You may be thinking, “Leadership isn’t just about intent — it’s about getting results.” That’s our definition of effective leadership. But leadership isn’t always effective.

A leadership initiative, we say, is any action you carry out with this attitude and intent. This means that you don’t need to be in a position of authority to exercise leadership. Leaders at all levels of agility have found that this way of thinking about leadership helps them to approach their work in a way that is more proactive and intentional.

Leadership isn’t something tied to an organizational role or a position. Leadership is a way of taking action with the attitude and intent to change something for the better.

It’s the actions you take that make you a leader.

I love how simple and clear this definition is. I’ll often note that anyone can be a leader regardless of position or role. And it’s always been in recognition of or encouragement of just these kinds of actions intended to make things better. Having this definition at hand has made that simpler and easier for me to identify.